Читать книгу: «Alchemy»

I’m sitting with my feet up on the desk pretending to be Philip Marlowe when the phone rings. Marlowe’s still the best when the phone hasn’t rung for days and the overdraft’s fast growing its fungoid web over the bank balance. Marlowe’s cool. I know Warshawski’s more my century. I ought to feel most at home with her but it’s Marlowe when the going gets tough. There’s just one problem though with my impersonation. By now I should have a tray full of dead butts. But I never learned how to inhale when we all tried it out in break at thirteen, behind the kitchen block where the smoke wouldn’t notice. And he was older than my mid thirties too. Forty at least; that was how Bogey played him anyway and he was the definitive.

‘Is that Lost Causes?’ The voice is light, male, what used to be called ‘cultured’.

‘It is.’

‘Do you do tribunals? Employment disputes?’

I do anything but I don’t say so. ‘Would you be applying for legal aid?’

“That won’t be necessary. Will you represent me?’

‘I need to see clients before I commit myself.’

‘Who am I speaking to? Would it be you taking my case?’

‘My name is Green, Jade Green. We’d better make an appointment Mr…?’

‘Dr Gilbert, Adrian Gilbert. I feel…if it could be as early as possible.’

‘Is tomorrow too soon?’ I try to keep any eagerness out of my voice.

‘Not at all. That will suit me very well.’

‘Ten o’clock then?’

‘Excellent.’

‘Just tell me who the plaintiff is?”

‘Defendant. The defendant is the University of Wessex. Till tomorrow,’ and he’s gone.

While he was speaking I’d opened a case file under his name and then this second one. I keep two files: the first I let the client see and the other is for myself, encrypted so that, in theory, only I have access, except that any twelve-year-old hacker could probably be into it quick as a traditional cat burglar up a drainpipe.

Next I run a check on him. Nothing in criminal listings. Nothing in the medical file. Not that sort of a doctor then or at least not accredited. Idly I try a general search by name. And bingo. ‘Adrian Gilbert. Died 1604.’ Oh great, ‘Uterine brother to Sir Walter Raleigh.’ So my guy is either an impostor or a fantasist.

I try the University of Wessex. I’ve never heard of it but I see it has its own website, the minimum requirement for existence nowadays, as a validation, a sure sign that you’re in business and up there with the big boys. Founded 1999. Not redbrick. Not even old poly. A private Thatcherite-style endowment, on the site of a former teacher training college. On the fringes of a London dormitory that might just qualify it for the Wessex brand. A ‘uni’ only in name. My intellectual snobbery is showing. We are the last generation who can afford it. Who am I to judge now, in these shapeshifting days?

Wessex campus is split between several sites. They show us a picture of the chapel. Nineteenth-century basilica style, a brick rotunda that must have been part of the original college, dedicated to St Walburgha. A fast train service to London every half hour: commutable. A global pharmaceutical giant has its base in the town and helps to fund the science faculty. Wessex offers the usual mishmash of courses, from artificial intelligence to sports tourism, boasting of its something for everyone policy. I wonder which of these Dr Adrian Gilbert fits into. I scroll through the list of subjects but it doesn’t name the teaching staff. Just as I’m about to click off I spot theology almost at the end of the line, with only tourism and youth studies tagging along behind. It stands out in its long gown and Geneva bands like silk bloomers among the Knickerbox flimsies. Well, tomorrow I’ll find out. It’s time to change into my leathers, get my boots on, helmet, gloves and wheel out the bike for my evening delivery. If Dr Adrian Gilbert could see me now would he be impressed or would he want to withdraw his case?

The Chinese takeaway I deliver for is a small family business in a quiet suburb. When their only son decided to try his luck in Australia they lost their errand boy. ‘Why,’ I asked when I’d been there a couple of months, ‘why me?’ There must have been plenty of young immigrants, students even, from Hong Kong families applying for the job in Loot. Mr Gao’s pale face with its delta of wrinkles had smiled fleetingly. ‘You are not Chinese; you are girl. There are many bad people run Chinese takeaway delivery. Deliver drugs, demand money. They don’t trouble you English girl.’

I found it hard to believe the triads had moved in on carriers of egg fried rice and bean curd but if Mr Gao thought so it was enough. They were a quiet close family, apart from Tommy who got away. Mr and Mrs Gao cook in the steaming, succulent kitchen behind, with a clashing of woks and metal pans. Mary takes the orders in the shop and over the phone. She’s shy and plain. Probably she would have liked to marry and have children but who is there for her to meet in Streatham Hill, unless a visiting cousin? I flirt with her a little when I call for my orders but I don’t think she understands. She ducks her head and smiles at me under her deep fringe, shadowing the liquorice pupils which are her only claim to attraction. As a young girl she must have had acne that’s left her skin lumpy and pitted. Sometimes I imagine putting my lips to it and saying: ‘It’s okay; you’re beautiful.’ At the end of my stint she hands me my brown paper carrier with the little silver oblong dishes under their cardboard caps that hold my freebie supper. Every night there’s something different so that I’m never sated. Mary always remembers what I’ve had the night before.

I didn’t mean to put all this in, even for my eyes only. The program asks me if I want to save it when I try to shut down. The ghost in the machine prompts us all the time to consider our own motives, our needs, our desires. If you don’t save, all will be lost. And yet it can always be found. Confiscated by the police, the computer gives up its secrets like any prisoner singing under the lash, rack, thumbscrew, electric prod, Chinese water torture. So why shouldn’t I save it just for myself? What have I got to hide?

Dr Gilbert buzzes the intercom on the dot of ten, before I’ve even got my feet up. My office is home as well as workplace but he isn’t to know that yet. Behind the desk is a partition with a door in it that leads to the kitchen, shower room and my student-style bedsit. Originally a warehouse, it was converted at the end of the nineties, leaving exposed minimalist steel girders and yellow London Brick walls. In its own way it’s related to the Wessex campus. Gilbert should feel at home. I tell him to come up. As yet there’s no lift, only stone steps and iron banisters.

When he puts his head round the door I see he’s a youngish Dr Who, collar-length brown hair, bow tie and granny glasses. As I get up he comes forward putting out a hand of slim manicured fingers.

‘I’m very grateful to you for seeing me so soon.’

‘Have a chair. Would you like a coffee?’

‘If it’s not too much trouble.’

‘Not at all.’ I go over to the filter machine where the glass goldfish bowl is gently seething. ‘Milk, sugar?’

‘Just milk thank you.’

I turn back from my coffee maker with our steaming cups. I can see he’s ‘all of a twitch’, as my mother would say. I’m afraid he might drop the cup and scald himself but he gets it safely down on my desk. ‘Did you find me easily, the office I mean?’ I’m trying to reassure him, to give him time to gather his wits. I guess he’s not used to the paraphernalia of the law.

‘I looked it up in the A-Z. I used to know London quite well but you get out of the habit…’

I open the top drawer of my desk and take out pad and pen. ‘I’ll need to make some notes.’

‘Of course. Where shall I begin?’

‘Tell me first about you. Date of birth, full name, address.’

The recitation of these simple facts steadies him. I could put them straight into my laptop of course but this sometimes frightens people, especially older people and Gilbert comes into that category though he’s only forty-nine. It’s more a cast of mind.

He takes me methodically through his degree and previous employment, before we get to Wessex and the immediate problem.

‘I have been accused by a small group of students of trying to corrupt their minds by teaching Satanism and perversion.’

Long ago when I started in independent practice I wanted to put up a favourite cartoon of mine showing the inside of a confessional box, with a monk leaning forward to listen to the supplicant on the other side of the grille and a sign above the monk’s head which reads: ‘Do not sound too surprised.’

‘Dangerous allegations.’

‘Very dangerous. I was summoned before the dean and disciplinary council. It was the students’ word against mine. They were believed. I was suspended and sacked.’

‘Sacked?’

‘I was on a short-term contract. When my first suspension ran out I expected to return to college, and my teaching, but a second suspension was slapped on, that took me to the end of my contract. I was told it would not be renewed.’

‘Why should the dean and council have believed them rather than you? Couldn’t you get other students to testify in your favour?’

‘They were too frightened. Ms Green…’ Gilbert hesitates, ‘you may find this hard to believe. You may even think it is mere paranoia on my part, but the college has been taken over by a sect, a fundamentalist group.’

‘What sort of sect?’ Far from suspecting him of paranoia, I see shades of the Rushdie fatwa rushing towards me, and find myself less than enthralled at letting loose a whole farrago of death threats, riot and arson. Still, a job is a job.

‘Extreme evangelical Christian.’

‘Creationist, Happy-Clappy?’ I’m showing off a bit.

‘Neither. This is something new. From America. The mother church, as they call it, has put money into the University of Wessex. The dean is their appointee. Many of the students are American.’

‘In these days of the internet, sects tend to be global. Didn’t the last immolation take place in Switzerland?’

‘There was a later one, in Zambia I seem to remember, but in both cases the cult originated in the States or had US links.’

‘Those students who accused you, are they American?’

‘Some of them. Not all. What would be their position in English law? Would it make a difference that they aren’t British subjects?’

‘The college must abide by UK employment law if it’s within the UK.’

‘So I can take them to an industrial tribunal?’

‘Employment tribunal. Yes, at this preliminary stage, as far as I can see. But I should warn you, Dr Gilbert, that going to law is often at the very least a disappointment, if not a down-right mistake. Think of Oscar Wilde, not to mention others in our own time. What exactly did the students allege?’

‘There were many things, among them that I distributed pornographic material to them.’

‘And did you?’

‘One person’s pornography is another’s truth. For example there was a poem about an erotic relationship between a Roman soldier and Christ on the cross which was prosecuted as an “obscene libel”. I think that was the term. You are too young to remember the case.’

‘But not too young to have studied it, if only for its rarity. Did the material you distributed fall into that category?’

‘Not quite.’

‘You said you were accused of Satanism. What exactly is your subject, Dr Gilbert?’

‘This particular course is on the history of science showing how it developed from earlier disciplines…’

‘Like?’

‘What some would call alchemy.’

‘And you? What would you call it?’

‘Proto-chemistry is a less emotive term. The great Liebig himself said that to him alchemy was merely the chemistry of the Middle Ages.’

I was remembering the big old Liebig condenser in a glass case in the school lab like some medieval retort.

‘The alchemists have had a pretty bad press since Ben Jonson, as charlatans and cheats.’

‘You are familiar with the work of Jonson, Ms Green? Somewhat unusual in a lawyer I should have thought.’

‘I only switched to law halfway through my degree. I began with the humanities.’

‘And why was that?’The tables have been suddenly and subtly turned. I’m now the one being questioned.

‘I decided there was no money in teaching English literature at ‘A’ level until I qualify for a pension. I would find that life too…’

‘Dull? Believe me, Ms Green, in my experience the academic life can be far from dull.’

‘I need to see a copy of the material you distributed.’ Perhaps he had been foolish, had thought young minds were more flexible, instead of less, often rigid with preconceptions, and fear of humiliation or exposure to the unknown. At thirty-six I’m a lot mellower, more tolerant than I was at sixteen.

‘It wasn’t just the material I distributed. That should have been harmless enough. After all I’m not a complete fool. I know about the duty of care and in loco parentis. I’ll give you copies of course but the real damage, the evidence used against me, came from what I didn’t circulate, that was stolen from my briefcase when I left it, carelessly I now realise, lying on a desk during a coffee break. Someone must have photocopied the lot and put the original back.’

‘Then it wasn’t stolen?’

‘The theft of intellectual property by illegal copying is a crime.’

‘Yes of course but one that’s hard to prove. What exactly was copied?”

‘Stolen. It’s a manuscript.’

‘By you?’

‘No, no. It dates back to the early seventeenth century.’

‘Then it’s no longer in copyright.’

‘But it’s mine. I am the owner.’

‘I think we would find it difficult to make much of a case out of that. I’m sorry, we’ll need something better, stronger.’

‘But the use to which it was put, to discredit me, blacken my reputation.’

‘I shall need to see it before I can go any further, decide whether to take your case, whether I think you indeed have a case.’ I see him wilt but I’m determined to get back the initiative in this interview.

‘Surely I qualify as a lost cause.’

‘Even with a cause that seems lost I have to see at least a chance of winning, otherwise I wouldn’t make a living.’ There’s no need to tell him about the night job. ‘I work on a no win no fee basis you see.’

‘I’m willing to pay you a retainer, just for your advice and…and support. Since this began I’ve felt very isolated, alone.’

‘You’re not married?’

‘No, and you?’

I hold up my ringless left hand. ‘When can you let me have the material?’

He opens his briefcase and takes out a thick wad, bound in a blue plastic cover. ‘I have a copy here.’

‘How do I know it’s the same as the original?’

“You’ll have to trust me. The original is in cipher. This is a kind of translation.’

‘You know the one thing you must never do is lie to your lawyer.’

‘I’m well aware of that. And in any case where would be the point?’

‘And this is the same document as was stolen from your briefcase, copied and returned?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Who do you believe stole it?’

‘Oh I know. It was the secretary of the Temple of the Latent Christ.’

‘The Temple of Christ?’

‘The Latent Christ. That’s what they call themselves.’

‘The name of the secretary?’

‘Mary-Ann Molders.’ He spells it out for me.

‘And she went to the dean and made the allegations against you that led to your being suspended? Were they of a sexual nature?’

‘She alleged that I was encouraging students to take part in rituals that had a sexual element.’

‘Did you?’

‘I told them about allegations in which alchemists were lumped together with witches. Both were prepared to predict the future, like present-day newspaper astrologers. Both made their living by supplying potions, love philtres, the Viagra of the day. All substances were permissible in providing what we would now call pharmaceuticals. Poppy, mandragora, meadowsweet, St John’s wort, sedatives, hallucinogens were all perfectly legal. Substances and procedures for affecting the minds and bodies of people and animals were sold all the time. Some of them were harmless, some to us would be disgusting, others are now outlawed.’

‘Did Mary-Ann Molders accuse you of encouraging the use of illegal substances as well?’

‘She did.’

‘Do you yourself use drugs?’

‘Like many people, I have used them. I’ve smoked some pot.’

‘And did you advocate their use?’

‘I might have been, shall we say, a little iconoclastic in my approach. I wanted my students to think, not just to accept what they were told.’

‘Would you say your style inclines to the satirical? That you like to provoke? That perhaps you are anti-authority?’

‘I believe a university education shouldn’t be a matter of spoon-feeding material into students’ heads. Life is more complex than that.’

I sense a certain arrogance in Dr Adrian Gilbert. ‘At the moment I can’t see that you have a legal leg to stand on to take an action to a tribunal.’ I watch him sag a little. Why am I saying this? There’s nothing in the in-tray. I need the money and I need to practise my profession, my craft. I pick up the plastic folder. ‘I’ll look at this and consider what you’ve told me and be in touch. I may make some enquiries of my own.’

‘Thank you, Ms Green. I am most grateful. How much do I owe you so far?’ He’s taking out his cheque-book.

I hesitate. But the rent is due at the end of the month.

‘The Law Society recommends standard minimum fees. I think we should stick to those.’

‘Of course.’

I tell him the rate per hour for a practising solicitor of four years’ standing. He writes the cheque without a quibble. Now he has me signed up, he thinks. We’ll see.

As soon as he’s out of the door, I open the typed document and read: The Memorial of Amyntas Boston.

This is the true memorial of Amyntas Boston now confined to Salisbury gaol for witchcraft, the which I deny, and writ in cipher as my father used for his own receipts, which is the common practice among those who call themselves the Sons of Hermes. Some would say that I am a witch by birth since they allege my father practised necromancy. He was a learned man, a magus and a chemist but no cheat or cozener or in league with the evil one. The countess would have had him live in her house as others did, the better to consult with him in her own laboratory, but he would not, for he valued his freedom too much and his pursuit of the philosopher’s stone. So he brought me up to labour alongside him, not at the furnace or the bellows, for which he had his laborant Hugh Harnham, for he said the heat of it would blacken my skin and the fumes cause me to faint, but in wiping his brow and limbs, and bringing him food and drink as he sweat much. For in seeking the stone that is the in principia of transmutation, he said only heat would do the trick of turning base metal into gold, and all things into each other, according to the laws of mutability. As the poet Spenser has it that ‘e’en the earth Great Mother of us all’ does change in some sort even though she be not in thrall to mutability, and if the earth why not all things else. It wants only the key to unlock and enter the innermost mystery. For this work I was clad only in my shirt and britches with wooden sandals to raise my feet above the hot cinders of the floor.

As there are those who keep watch for comets all night so my father laboured many hours together, for they who seek the stone, the adepts, are possessed by this search and nothing is for them beyond it, except that they must gain their bread as others do. And for this, which was the preparation of unguents, plaisters, syrups, and draughts to summon Morpheus, I took my full share to free him for the Great Work.

I therefore learned all that he could teach me of these mysteries so that when he died and the countess summoned me and demanded of me what skill I had, I could answer truthfully that, except for that art of transmutation which he kept secret even from me, aside from what I could see with my own eyes as he laboured at the furnace, I could do all those things she desired which was to assist her in her own concoctions. My father had been dead but a fortnight when she sent her servant to find me out and bid me come to Ivychurch, her house, where she then was in mourning, the earl himself being dead only three months.

I was led into her chamber where she was seated against the window so that when I looked at her I was dazzled by her beauty, for the light beaming through the lace of her ruff she was as it were haloed, and at every point winked sparklets of crystal from the pearls and precious stones that adorned it.

‘Come here child,’ she said. ‘I could not have your father. Shall I have you instead?’

‘As my lady pleases,’ I answered.

‘My lady does please then. I shall keep you here or Dr Gilbert may be jealous to have you underfoot at Wilton. Do you know Dr Gilbert child?’

‘My father spoke of him madam. And sometimes they would meet at the Pheasant to talk of chemical matters.’ I did not say my father had called him very sarcastic and a great buffoon but that his relation to Sir Walter Raleigh, he was his half-brother by the same mother, gave him the licence of speaking his mind to all, both great and little.

‘What do they call you child Boston?’ I hung my head and did not answer. ‘Come now child, you must have a name. What did your father call you?’

‘Sometimes one thing madam, sometimes another.’

‘Shall I lose patience with you? What things?’

‘Sometimes Amyntas madam and sometimes…’

‘Yes?’

‘Amaryllis.’

‘He was not such a great philosopher as I supposed then, since he did not know the sex of his own child.’

‘When he was engaged in the Great Work madam, he was forgetful of all else.’

‘Come closer and let me look at you.’

I did as she commanded and as soon as I was near enough she took my chin in her white hand and turned my head first to the right and then to the left. I could smell her scent which I recognised as a distillation of roses with some other sweetness such as jasmine admixed. ‘How old are you?’

‘Near sixteen madam.’

‘And yet there is no sign of hair upon your lip or chin. What is the mystery of these names? What did your mother call you?’

‘Nothing madam. She died in giving birth to me, and my twin brother who died with her.’ I paused.

‘Go on.’

‘He was christened Amyntas.’

‘And you are Amaryllis? Yet you dress as your brother were he alive. Do you always so?’

‘No madam. When visitors came to see my father’s house I dressed in female attire to attend my father.’

‘But were not the neighbours and his friends puzzled?’

‘He had no family madam. And the neighbours believed there were still two of us.’

‘And you, what do you believe?’

‘Sometimes when I look in the glass I do not know who looks back at me. Whichever I am carries the other inside.’

‘Such confusion we find in dreams or in the fancies of the play, where boy plays girl playing boy. Which would you choose?’

‘I cannot say madam.’

‘One day the choice will be forced on you. For now we will continue with the game. Do you bleed child?’

‘No my lady.’

‘Strange. I bled at thirteen. Well you shall be Amyntas, my page and assistant, when we are alone here at Ivychurch, or even in Ramsbury, but at Wilton, the great house, or in London if we should go there, you shall put on your woman’s clothes and not be noticed among the press of other maids. Shall you like this game child Boston?’

‘If my lady pleases.’

‘As she does. Can you read aloud child?’

‘Yes madam. I read often to my father, both in our own tongue and from the Latin works of the chemical masters as Paracelsus and Nicholas Flammel.’

‘Then you shall read to me. I have a humour to hear my brother, Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. Do you know his book? It is many years since I have opened it, when last I closed it for the printer, at the end of my labours to restore his work to the world in full. I have a mind to visit it again now that I am alone and my time is my own.’

‘My lady is still young. She may marry again.’

‘I am the age now the earl was when he married me but it is not the same for women. A ripe man may marry a young maid who will give him children as I did. And you are the age I was when I was espoused to him after two years at court in her majesty’s service. Sir Philip, my brother, wrote of passion between young lovers but I have never known it. Only duty. Yet a woman must marry, and not be too picky in her choice, for without marriage she has no domain, no power. When he was away the earl left all things in my hands. I have had, you could say, my own little court far removed from London. All this will change now, changes already, and will change more when I am just the dowager and mother of the earl and my son takes a wife to be his countess. Enough of sighing, come my young Amyntas-Amaryllis let me hear you read to judge whether your voice and your understanding be good enough for my brother’s words.’

So began my new life in the lady’s household as it moved here and there between her domains, now in London, at Barnard’s Castle or at her three country estates in Wiltshire or in Wales at Cardiff Castle. The young earl was still in disgrace with the queen for he had got her lady-in-waiting, Mistress Fitton, with child yet would not marry her. It was said Mrs Fitton had tucked up her clothes and gone out from the court disguised as a man in a white cloak to meet her lover. The child was born dead and Earl William, after a stay in the Fleet, banished to Wilton, where he moped about the house. His mother could not forgive him and kept herself apart while he wrote begging letters to Sir Robert Cecil to be taken back into her majesty’s favour and given some small posts which his father had held, and be freed of the royal wardship he suffered rather than enjoyed. I was glad not to go to Wilton in my maid’s clothes at this time, for the young earl was said to be immoderately given up to women.

In the mornings my lady prayed privately and read from her own book of psalms which she and her noble brother had made together. Then when we had breakfasted on milk, white bread and honey we went to our work in the laboratory where we made medicines from all kind of herbs, seeds and minerals, both salves, cordials and other potions.

I would chop and grind the ingredients with pestle and mortar, then transfer them according to her instructions to the limbec for distilling into the liquors that gleamed bright as gemstones, sapphire, emerald, ruby or the garnet yellow of sulphurous emetics from her own receipt ‘The Countess of Pembroke’s Vomit’ for purging.

There were many little drawers with clay boxes of substances such as I knew from my father, already powdered: saltpetre and opiates, poppy and St John’s wort, saffron, and spices from the East, sandalwood, spikenard or our own meadowsweet that brings a merry heart.

After, her patients would come to her with all manner of complaints and sicknesses: ulcers, wounds, bruises, ills of every member and part of the body and we would apply the salves, plaisters and dressings or mix up fresh remedies to cleanse the insides, or wash the skin or eyes, and to dispel melancholy. When she had attended to her own family there would come those from the town and the villages round about because of her reputation for skill and kindness.

All this I helped her in and also was at her side when she wrought at the business of the household and her estates, writing letters and paying bills and keeping her diurnal of instructions and accounts for food and drink, bed-linen and clothing, tutors’ and stewards’ reports, for her hand was in everything, great and small. Sometimes she would sigh and regret the days of her youth when she, her noble brother and her ladies would laugh and read together, lolling on the grass under the trees, or be pleasantly busy at their writings.

Other times though we were all merry enough: the ladies at their cushions and tapestries according to her pattern, for she is the finest needlewoman in England at making hangings of her own devising to adorn the walls and beds of Wilton, and other her houses. As they worked I would read aloud or Signor Ferrabosco, the younger, as he was known still even though his father had long returned to his native Italy, would play upon his lute and sing of his own composing. But best of all I came to like those times when we were alone together and I read to her from the Arcadia or she opened her heart to me and talked of past, present or future cares. Then some about her began to be envious that she should spend so much time on her page and labourant who was not of noble birth. I thought I heard whisperings, words that broke off at my appearance, small acts of spite, as drink spilled by my elbow jogged when I had fresh clothes on, the toughest cuts of meat and smallest portions, and sometimes rough teasing from her ladies when she was absent. Once I heard one say that she had loved her brother too well and was like to make the same mistake again.